I’m sure a lot of you have a love/hate relationship with Adobe Bridge…and some of you may never have used it at all, vaguely aware that it comes with the Creative Suite. You may have read my article a couple of years ago in the Creative COW Magazine which detailed how I organize and manage thousands of files using Bridge. That hasn’t changed, but no matter how well I organize my folders, and keyword (is that a verb? It is now!) my assets, I’m always going through yellow notepad sheets and diving into manila folders when it comes to finding the After Effects project which created the final version of the open I made two years ago. Yup…the client needs a revision – the logo has been updated. The search begins…

Now I always knew that in the Render Panel there was a switch which allowed me to create a Project Link, that digital trail of crumbs that would get me back to my After Effects project. And I always left that switch on.

And I also knew that if I opened After Effects, then opened the final output file as a Project, that it would import the Project in which the output was created. The pain in the neck was, that the Project would show up in a folder, not arranged as it originally was; so I would open the final output as a Project in AE, write down the Project name, close AE, then open the original project. Whew! A lot of steps, but quicker than plowing through the notepad pages for my project notes.

So it occured to me that if the output file has a Project Link embedded, it must be somewhere  in the Metadata! Thus began my search a day or two ago. Since most of the output I create is in Quicktime format, I figured that a quick visit to the friendly Apple support forums would get me some immediate answers…no dice! There was nothing useful about the metadata, unless you’re a developer…

I looked in the After Effects Metadata panel…nothing there. I downloaded MediaInfo, one of the industry standards for viewing video codec and metadata information…nothing there either. So I’m down to my last search…and before this turns into a Lord Buckley rant, I’m going to tell you. I found it! In the next to last Tab of the Metadata info!

If you go into the XMP Metadata by right-clicking the .mov file, the window which opens has a Tab view – in the Advanced Tab, you roll open the Schema entry; under creatorAtom:aeProjectLink (struct), lo and behold, there sits the project name with the full path!

I can also move the Advanced tab over to the left of the Tab’s original location (which you can see I’ve done in the above screen capture), and I can get to the project file path in no time! This really made my day, and if you have to regularly play “Find the After Effects Project”, it will make your day…

When you put the specs and functionality of the Playbook next to those of the mini, the mini begins to look…well…mini. The Playbook has a dock with a fast charger that gets it back up to speed in no time; not so the mini. The Playbook has HDMI out, so it will play back HD video on my big-ass monitor; not so the mini. The Playbook has 1GB of RAM, the mini has 512, or so everyone thinks – Apple’s not talking about it. The 32GB Playbook costs just south of 200 dollars; the mini – just north of 400 dollars. So just what is it that has kept the Playbook in the shadows? Apple mavens swear that there are no apps for the Playbook – thus far I haven’t had any problems with either the Blackberry App offerings, or the multitude of Android apps which are daily being ported to the Playbook, and which, by the way, any reasonably savvy user can do in about 10 minutes. I’ve got the ability to read and edit Microsoft Office Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Acrobat files. I have a Form designer which allows me to create custom small databases for various tracking purposes. There are at least two free teleprompter apps for video production, and the list goes on. I’m not into gaming, so maybe that’s where the Playbook choices lag; I couldn’t care less – the Playbook is a business tool. The two cameras on the Playbook are superior in megapixels – ok, one of them is the same – to the mini. And I could go on and on with the comparisons, most of which will be superior on the Playbook side.

The real comparison in any case is real world usage. I can’t begin to compare here, since I don’t own an iPad mini, but as a business user, my Playbook is my tool. I use it for business documents in client meetings, as a camera for site surveys for video production, to check my business and personal email, through two different portals. It also does yoeman duty for demo playback in HD.

And here is where I really love the Playbook. If you remember, RIM has always had the highest levels of security on their phone devices, which is why I settled on the Blackberry phone when starting my business; I often have to carry information which is under Non-Disclosure Agreement, so having a device with rock-solid security was tops on my list. The Playbook also has a built-in security feature, called Bridge; it allows me to have access to all of my emails, contacts, calendar, and other critical information, without a snippet of it actually living on the Playbook – this means that if my Playbook is lost or stolen, unless the thief has my phone as well, there’s no important information on it! And if I’m really paranoid, there’s a free app from Blackberry which allows me to wipe all of my personal information from my phone and Playbook, then track its location, so it can be found, and the thief brought to justice. I love it!

So I guess it’s all in the marketing – Blackberry has given us the best of all the tablets in their Playbook, but either no one has recognized it, or nobody cares. It doesn’t matter to me – the Playbook is my business tool of choice. And for a great article which compares the Playbook and iPad mini side by side, check this out.

Enough of the controversy…so what’s new? The first thing, and this applies to the entire Creative Suite, is that you can now license the software through the Creative Cloud, a new and often confusing way to buy your software on the installment plan. If you can’t afford to buy the Master Collection, or even the Production Premium bundle, but you’re bringing in enough to make a monthly payment, it’s worth considering. I like to own the license outright, and hold the discs in my hands, just in case…

Adobe has cleaned up the interface of PPro CS6, taking what many considered to be a cluttered interface, and making it cleaner looking, while at the same time enabling user customization, so that if you want something which seems to have disappeared, you can bring it back with a couple of clicks.  The Mercury Playback Engine has given Premiere Pro enhanced performance, stability, plus the ability to play well with Nvidia graphics cards, as well as some Open-CL based graphics cards on the Mac side. They’ve also added the Mercury Transmit Plugin, a direct line to many of the standard devices used for capture and playback. Some of these include Matrox, Bluefish, and AJA peripherals, and there are more in development. It appears to be Adobe’s way around waiting for new driver releases, by working directly with the hardware manufacturers.

Premiere Pro now has Adjustment Layers, which, for those familiar with After Effects, allows for non-destructive color correction and effects over multiple clips in the timeline. There are over 50 new additions to the PPro arsenal, many of them user requests – Adobe really does listen to the end-user. The Dynamic Timeline Trimming feature gives the Editor more workflow options. Multi-Cam Editing has been enhanced, to give the user more than four cameras, and getting rid of the nesting which was necessary in older versions of PPro.

The Three-Way Color Corrector has been made more intuitive, and less cluttered. Here’s a detailed look at what’s changed from Adobe’s Todd Kopriva. The Project Panel is faster to navigate, with scrubbing, skimming, setting in and out points, and resizeable thumbnails. Native Camera Support has been greatly improved, with native support for video from the ARRI Alexa, Canon C300, Red Epic, and Red Scarlet-X cameras. You can jump into your edit without transcoding or rewrapping your footage. And with the addition of the mini-app, Adobe Prelude, you can capture and log footage in the field, do a rough cut, and drop that rough cut right into Premiere Pro when you get back to your editing station. This will prove to be a great workflow tool for news gathering organizations, where a rough cut of a news pack can be done on the way back to the facility, then dropped into PPro for adding the voice-over. Here’s an overview by Maxim Jago.

Audio handling has been greatly improved, with the ability to combine and pan stereo and mono tracks, adaptive track types, and multichannel master capabilities, with export capability for those who need to send the audio tracks out of house. Image display has been improved, with support for the new MacBook Pro Retina display, and 1080p in the program monitor. There’s also the ability to tweak settings, editing and applying filters during playback, a feature I’ve wanted since my days working with Combustion, which had this capability long ago.

So here we go again…this is getting lengthy, but the new Premiere Pro CS6 feature set has been so greatly enhanced, and fixes to long-running complaints addressed, that it’s hard to fit it all in. Here’s a link to more of the new stuff in Premiere Pro CS6. I’ll be back with a look at what’s new in Adobe Photoshop CS6 in my next post. Happy editing!

Let’s start with my main tool, After Effects. The really big one is something you’ll never see, but you will notice. Full 64-bit performance, with a Global Performance Cache which will make you wonder how you ever worked without it! It involves several features, and you can get the best explanation straight from Adobe. In essence, you get faster performance while you’re working, a RAM cache that “knows” what you’re working on, and saves pieces you haven’t changed, so the old days of edit, re-render, edit, re-render, are much improved. There’s also what Adobe calls a “persistent disk cache”, which saves what you’ve rendered to RAM, then has it ready to go when you re-open the file. That’s the stuff you don’t see.

There’s also the 3D Camera Tracker…you see it in action in movie and TV show trailers and promos all the time: 2D, or 3D text incorporated into a scene in which the camera is moving, and the text looks as if it was shot with the camera, perfectly incorporated into the scene. It’s a gee-whiz feature, but there are lots of practical applications. Vince Laforet has a nice Jon Carr tutorial on his website.

Everyone’s been screaming for 3D in After Effects for a long time, and there have been several third-party plugins around for years, such as 3D Invigorator, from Zaxwerks, and the much newer Element 3D, from Video Copilot. If you’ve gone through the tutorials for the new 3D feature, you may be disappointed that it’s not as full-featured as some of the other 3D plugins or apps, such as 3D Studio. Remember, this is After Effects…also remember that it’s the first step toward 3D, and that Adobe almost always gets it right. For now, you can only extrude, bevel, and set material properties, but there are quite a few limitations, which are explained nicely toward the end of Brian Maffitt’s tutorial. It’s a great first step, but be aware of the limitations – for now, you’ll want a couple of 3D options on your plate.

The really big one for me (I know – I’m a geek) is Variable Mask Feathering, the ability to control your masks very precisely. This one requires a visual explanation, and Brian Maffitt explains it nicely. If you do any rotoscoping work, this will save your sanity.

For those of you who use Illustrator in your workflow, which I do for client logos and design work, there’s now the ability to convert, animate, and extrude vector art work, opening up a lot of new possibilities. First off, there’s no more cutting and pasting Illustrator paths, then digging in to your AE settings when it doesn’t work right. It’s now as simple as importing the .ai file, and Convert Shapes to Vector Layer. Here’s a quick look at how you do it, from Brian Maffitt. If you haven’t used Illustrator much before, now is the time to get your act together, and learn why it is such an essential tool in the graphic design workflow.

Rolling Shutter Repair – if you don’t use a DSLR for shooting video – you won’t get this one. Because of the way DSLR shutters scan, from top to bottom, you often get what’s popularly called “Jello-Cam” effects, in which a moving object, or a moving shot, looks distorted, in a very unpleasing way. If you think back to early black and white photos of racing cars, the wheels always looked as if they were oval, a product of the slow shutter speeds of the day. Bring that into the digital world of “still” cameras shooting video, and the problem multiplies. Elements moving through the frame look skewed, and camera moves look as if they were shot through clear jello. Once again, Brian Maffitt gives us an overview.

If you’re primarily involved in using After Effects for, as the name implies, Effects, you’re going to very happy with this update. There are over 90 new and improved effects in the pallette, some from Cycore, and some part of the Adobe set. Now 32 bits per channel, may sound a bit confusing, but once again, when it’s visually explained, you’ll get why this is such a big step forward. In addition to the new effects, the improved effects will get your productions looking better, especially if you use glows, blurs, and ramps a lot.

If you’ve arrived at the Adobe doorstep by way of AVID or Final Cut Pro, you’ll find that there are several improvements in the workflow. AVID AAF and Final Cut Pro 7 XML files play better with After Effects, and there are also some RED workflow improvements with both Premiere Pro and After Effects.

Alright, I’m going to have to keep this from becoming a tome, so in the next few blog posts, I’m going to address the new features in Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and Illustrator, but before I take off, here’s a set of tips from Brian Maffitt on configuring your system for best After Effects performance. It’s not quite plug-and-play, but it is fairly simple, mostly a matter of giving your system the most memory you can afford, then configuring your cache drives to give the Global Performance Cache all you can. There’s also some great information on how NVIDIA cards work with the Ray Trace capability, and how to get the fastest card for your investment.

I hope you find this information useful – I always devote a part of my work day to finding new features and production shortcuts which will make my life easier, and improve my production value capabilities, and I’m always happy to share them.

What I didn’t explain, was how I managed the thousands of files which weren’t on our servers. My secret was Catfish, free disk cataloguing software that had a tiny footprint, and would enable you to find any file that was on your massive collection of CDs, DVDs, floppies (dare I say it), thumb drives, and even network and local internal drives, without having to physically insert them, or be logged on to them. You didn’t even have to install it, since it was just a basic executable file which could be left on a thumb drive, along with all of the catalogues – the size of a large catalogue was minimal, since Catfish was made to live on a 3.5″ floppy disk. The catalogues could be searched with wildcards, and you could sort, export, and even print logs to store in your disk cases!  So now the bad news – I tried to run it on both my Vista and Win 7 machines, and it wouldn’t load. Apparently it only works up to and including Win XP.

Now the good news! Apparently Catfish lives on – under the name Cathy. Programmer Robert Vašíček in Slovakia has come up with a small package which is very reminiscent of Catfish (which ended development in the mid-90s), and seems to work just as well, if not better. It even has some cool features that Catfish didn’t have. You can catalogue a folder just by dragging and dropping it from Windows Explorer to the Catalog tab in Cathy, and it’s done! Features include the ability to ignore file types or directories, catalogue subdirectories, use wildcards or part of the file name, find duplicates and clean them up, browse directories, and a whole lot more. Although the package is free, there’s a donate via PayPal button, which I intend to use. Cathy is well worth the cost of a few beers, and it will save me a lot of headaches in tracking down the thousands of files I have to manage and retrieve.

You can find Cathy at the developer’s home page. Scroll down to the middle of the page to download Cathy – by the way, there are French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch versions available for those of you whose primary language is not English. Happy fishing!

[8/29/12]  As a follow up to the above, I ran into some problems with Cathy working in Windows 7 64-bit, so I feel it necessary to post another alternative, which works very well. It’s called Gentibus CD, and you can find it here. I have installed it, and have it running in Windows 7 64-bit. It doesn’t catalogue quite as fast as the slim and trim Cathy or Catfish, but, needless to say, it works, and it’s Freeware. I plan to donate to the programmer, though, since a good cataloguer is worth a lot when you can put your hands on a file without inserting a disk. I tested it on DVDs, CDs, an external USB drive, and network drives, and it worked well.

The first step is to run a file called “GPUSniffer.exe” in DOS mode (found in several places on your system – mine was in the Adobe folder where my software lives), which goes under the hood and finds the specs of your graphics card. The important thing to write down is the name of the card. For me, it was “GeForce GTX 260″, with the spaces included – it has to be the system card name. Then it was a simple matter to go to the Premiere Pro root directory – where the “Adobe Premiere Pro.exe” file lives, then open the file called “cuda_supported_cards.txt”. This is where Adobe puts its’ list of supported cards – nice of them to make it editable, don’t you think? After adding the system name (case-sensitive, by the way) to the list, you save it. When you next run Premiere Pro CS6, you will find that under the Project tab, Project Settings, General, there is now the option to use Mercury Playback Engine GPU Acceleration, in addition to the Software Only choice, which was the greyed out choice before you made the hack. By the way, before you do the above, make sure you have downloaded and installed the very latest Nvidia drivers for your particular card. The link will automatically scan for your card, and find your drivers, if you need them updated.

By the way, if you want to use the After Effects CS6 raytrace 3D option (which you know you do), there’s a similar process to enable your card, although the file which gets hacked in this case is called “raytracer_supported_cards.txt”. You can find a step-by-step for this hack on the Studio 1 site as well. I think I covered everything you need in the above, but read through the exhaustive details on the Studio 1 site, just to make sure. By the way…it seems to have sped things up considerably in both Premiere Pro, and the After Effects 3D render, but I’ve got some testing ahead of me. Happy Hacking!

Now what’s cool about this project, and really gets me excited about it, is that the amphitheater which is the heart of the project, will contain a stage, constructed with 13th Century timber-framing techniques, and powered by a huge, 11 Kilowatt solar panel array. It takes the best of ancient and modern techniques and fuses them into a structure built for music and entertainment. And all it needs is a little more help to bring it to completion. Imagine a warm summer evening in downtown Warner, NH…you enjoy a concert in the park, with a performance on a stage which looks like a cathedral, and is powered by the sun which is just going down over the Mink Hills in the distance. What better way to spend your time? And you can help make it happen with a click on the Widget below! Thanks.

That’s where I was for several weeks…no, I didn’t spend every waking minute trying to figure it out, but I did follow the suggestions, and went to the WordPress Codex site:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks

I learned a little, but came back to my Admin page more confused than ever. I’m not a webmaster in the true sense of the word, able to go under the hood and hack my way to success via HTML, or even WordPress-eze. So I tried the first suggestion of going to the Settings/Permalinks section of my Admin settings, and bravely changing the Permalinks setting to something “prettier”. After several seconds of trepidation, I pushed the Update button, and went to my website. The homepage was showing just fine, but when I clicked to navigate to any other page on my site, I got the dreaded 404 error. So I immediately broke into a cold sweat, went back to the Permalinks settings, and changed back to the default. Saved! My website was back in action, but no prettier than before.

When I had a bit of spare time between animation and television commercial projects, I started looking for plugins which might do the job which I seemed unable to do. I installed several, tried them out, made the Permalink changes, and…nothing! None of them seemed to work. Let me state that I’m using a WordPress template created by Kriesi, who has been very helpful throughout the process of “birthing” my website; so I figured that maybe the fact that my site was sitting within a template had something to do with the plugins not working. I’ll never know, since I didn’t want to bother Kriesi with something outside of his realm.

I had also read, right in the same Permalinks setting on my Admin page, that if only my .htaccess file was writeable, I wouldn’t be having this problem. You can find that all explained at:

 http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks#Fixing_.htaccess_Generation_Issues

By the way, notice how pretty the WordPress URL is – Grrrrr! So I went under the hook again, to the root directory of my website, and started searching for the elusive .htaccess file…no dice! I finally figured out that I needed to turn on a switch in Filezilla, which allowed hidden files to be shown. If you ever need it, it’s in the Filezilla menu under Server/Force showing hidden files. Voila, hidden files showed up, but there was no .htaccess file anywhere to be found. After a bit more reading and head scratching – actually a lot of head scratching, I read somewhere that it’s possible to have a website up and running in WordPress without an .htaccess file.
Then I read somewhere else that it’s really easy to create your own .htaccess file, and then paste the suggested text which appears at the bottom of the Permalinks setting into that file, then copy it to the root directory of your website. I went through two weeks of wondering and worrying whether it would trash my site, then got up the courage this morning.

So here’s the trick, and it’s really simple:

Open Notepad, or a simple text editor, then go into your Admin page under Settings/Permalinks. Change the setting to whatever you want, then update – you’ll get the error message about the writable .htaccess file, with a paragraph of “code” further down the page, which you then cut and paste into the new Notepad file. Mine looked like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

Save the Notepad file as htaccess.txt, because a file with a period at the beginning of it won’t be able to be saved in Notepad (the final filename will be .htaccess, but I’m getting ahead of myself). Send that file via Filezilla, or whatever FTP software you use, to the root directory of your website. Then, right-click the file, and choose Rename. Rename the file to “.htaccess”, and double check that it was renamed correctly and shows up with the “Force showing hidden files” switch turned on in Filezilla.

Now go back to your Admin page, update, and check your website. It worked like a charm for me, and would have worked two months ago if I hadn’t been hesitant to try what was suggested right on the Admin/Settings/Permalinks page. I hope this works for you. By the way, I’m using WordPress 3.0.3, and I use FatCow, the only wind-powered web hosting service I know of. I’m also running Vista Business 64-bit. Good luck!

So what’s new in the CS6 Master Collection (which by the way, I haven’t installed yet – I always wait for a couple of bug fixes and finish any projects I’m working on before doing the install)? In the broadest sense, Soundbooth is gone, replaced by Audition. Flash Catalyst is gone – I was just getting up to speed with it and loving it – I’ll continue to use the CS5.5 version. For video editors, you’ll find a new replacement for OnLocation, called Prelude, which enables the field producer to capture footage, log it and mark in and out points, create a rough edit, then transfer that edit right into Premiere Pro CS6 – this should prove very useful for news and serial format production crews. Here’s a link to a short video.

After Effects CS6 has added some killer new features, including the ability to extrude and render true 3D, right in the program. The only caveat to potential users is that you need to have a certain level of NVidia graphics card to push all those pixels, and the shapes you extrude have to be Illustrator vectors. As if that weren’t enough, they’ve added a 3D camera tracker - I just bought The Foundry’s Camera Tracker for After Effects, so I’m a bit upset about that, but I’ll now get a chance to compare them side by side. For those of you shooting with DSLR’s, there’s a Rolling Shutter Repair plugin that, while not totally foolproof, will help you fix the jello-cam effect that comes from having moving images in your footage, or panning too quickly. But probably the best feature is one you won’t have to click on – a global performance cache that will speed up your workflow considerably.

Premiere Pro CS6 is now taking the spotlight as a Final Cut Pro X killer, partly due to the cross-grade offer targeted at disgruntled FCPX users, partly due to the fact that the software is finally coming into its’ own as a powerful, adaptable NLE, that works natively with just about any format you can throw at it. The feedback on the Creative Cow Premiere Pro Forum has been pretty positive, and Adobe, as usual, is pretty responsive to the various problems of users jumping over from other NLEs, or having hardware issues with drivers. The transition seems pretty smooth, but I’ll find out first hand shortly, when I do my own install of the Master Collection.

I’ve just scratched the surface here, and haven’t even got to mention all the new features and improvements in Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, Encore, Bridge, and the other packages in the suite, but this is a blog, not a book. For a really good overview of the Creative Suite 6 titles, take a look at Adobe TV.

The second you click on that URL, and choose something of interest, the data is sent to several different companies, all bent on figuring out what you want, then tailoring advertising targeted at what they think you want. There are over a hundred companies working on various phases of making you the target, some household names (Microsoft and Google, for example), and some you’ve never heard of.

If you’ve ever noticed the websites you go to circling for the kill with surprising accuracy, you’ll want to read this article from a recent Atlantic. It’s a chilling view of who’s mining your data, and why the “Opt-out” process doesn’t opt us out of being tracked. And we’re only getting started…